Background

Many users who are not coders are unwilling to invest the initial effort in changing to Linux.

These users sometimes say that the time spent on learning and configuring Linux takes away from their actual work and makes them less productive.

While it may or may not be true that Linux is as easy to use as (say) Windows, the Linux user is less likely to have support through acquaintances who know Linux. For the experience of installing Linux for the first time to be comparable to installing Windows or starting to use a Mac, the Linux installation has to be extremely smooth and intuitive.

These factors lead to the ironies such as representatives of open source foundations using non-free operating systems

If making non-free software (including drivers, and popular programs such as Skype) difficult to install for a newbie leads to frustration, it may contribute to these users giving up on free software.

In an ?ICT4D context (ICT for Development), support is often lacking, and the emphasis is often on introducing computers to children who have never seen them before.

In ?ICT4D and education contexts, sellers of proprietary systems can be quite aggressive in promoting their systems, and one of their selling points is their claim that their systems are easier to use.

Status

This project has been worked on by Debian/LXDE developer Andrew Lee and other developers at DebConf9 (Spain, July 23 to 30, 2009), mini-DebConf Taiwan (Taipei, Sep 26 to 27, 2009). And also the effort on lubuntu.

The project is moving slowly at present (late 2010, early 2011) due to lack of time by Andrew Lee.

Contact

Andrew Lee: (his first name) at linux dot org dot tw

A mailing list will be set up later.

License

Pages related to the EasyLXDE project are dual-licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0 (unported) and the GPL. (The GPL is used to ensure that documentation can be used for commenting code if necessary, and also to ensure that all images come with the "source" code, e.g. the .xcf or .psd file.)